A New Way to Tell Stories That Outlive the Media's Attention Span

Coda is an experiment in reporting and presenting the news. Instead of breaking news, its editorial team wants to report in depth on crises as they unfold, for periods of at least seven months.

The Coda site becomes a compendium on that particular topic. Currents, seen here running horizontally, are a new storytelling tool created by design firm Method.

Currents get plotted out on calendars and pertain to one thematic hook, like violence, or fragmentation of the state, (in the case of the Ukrainian conflict), and let viewers see how issues intensify over time.

Coda will also include a grid of Collections, that still adheres to one area of coverage, but gets organized by formats, like “Across the Lines” video diaries, editorials from guest writers, photo essays, and so on.

Coda isn't about breaking the news. It's about doing a deep dive into a humanitarian issue, and staying when other news outlets have packed up and moved on.

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A New Way to Tell Stories That Outlive the Media's Attention Span

Coda is an experiment in reporting and presenting the news. Instead of breaking news, its editorial team wants to report in depth on crises as they unfold, for periods of at least seven months.

The Coda site becomes a compendium on that particular topic. Currents, seen here running horizontally, are a new storytelling tool created by design firm Method.

Currents get plotted out on calendars and pertain to one thematic hook, like violence, or fragmentation of the state, (in the case of the Ukrainian conflict), and let viewers see how issues intensify over time.

Coda will also include a grid of Collections, that still adheres to one area of coverage, but gets organized by formats, like “Across the Lines” video diaries, editorials from guest writers, photo essays, and so on.

Coda isn't about breaking the news. It's about doing a deep dive into a humanitarian issue, and staying when other news outlets have packed up and moved on.

How do you get your news? That’s not a newspaper versus online versus Twitter question. Rather, how do you thematically consume the news?

Odds are chronologically, according to what happened last. That’s how the bulk of news organizations provide news to readers, and it’s a format that a fledgling startup called Coda wants to try and upend. “Rather than just tracking chronologically what’s happened, we wanted to show the thematic evolution on a crisis,” says Abigail Fielding-Smith, Coda’s editorial lead. Fielding-Smith and Coda’s two other founders and global news correspondents, who’ve collectively worked for places like the BBC and The New York Times, feel there is “a greater hunger of more in-depth, nuanced coverage than the mainstream media were able to provide.” More specifically, Coda wants to cover a crisis with original reporting and then stay there—for a minimum of seven months—after other news organizations have moved on. The site then becomes a compendium on, for example, the conflict in Ukraine (the team prototyped the idea around that crisis).

Coda doesn’t exactly have the budget to gauge the market’s appetite on this, but anecdotally they’re on trend. Fielding-Smith’s go-to example is when her sister texted her while the earliest protests in the Ukraine were underway. “She said ‘I’m watching protests on the telly, but don’t know why they’re protesting,’” she says. Plus, as *Serial'*s wild success showed, there's a desire for longer, concentrated stories. And other single topic news sites, like Syria Deeply, have launched and stayed afloat in recent years.

Courtesy of Coda and Method

The Coda team took the problem to design studio Method’s London office. Besides the basic fact of needing a website, they needed to solve for a couple of questions like, “How do you encourage people to follow a story thematically?” and “If you’re not curating the material by what happened latest, if that’s not your navigational principle, then what is?”

In order to both show how a crisis unfolds and how different stories connect to each other, Method and Coda had to build new storytelling devices. The marquee tool is a Current. Currents get plotted out on calendars and pertain to one thematic hook, like violence, or fragmentation of the state, in the case of the Ukraine example. They both “provide a meta-commentary that lets you see the intensification of that trend” Fielding-Smith says, and offer several thumbnail entry points to longer stories. Readers can also view multiple currents at once for a bird’s eye view of when certain turmoil or events began and ended.

Less innovative from a UX perspective, but equally helpful, are Collections. The grid of Collections still adheres to one area of coverage, but gets organized by formats, like “Across the Lines” video diaries, editorials from guest writers, photo essays, and so on. It’s important to note that Coda doesn’t aspire to break news; instead, the editors want to sink their teeth into a crisis and cover it from as many angles as possibles, with as many different voices as possible. It’s the kind of comprehensiveness oft-seen in interactive editorials from major newspapers, but instead of one-offs it'll be all the time.

One glaring omission in the graphic layout Method created? Ads. There’s no banner ad, and no white space reserved off to the side. The Coda team says they’ll be applying for philanthropic grants to fund the site, and will look into white-labeling and licensing the editorial product for other projects that want to be “powered by Coda.” And even further down the road, they might re-package reporting in its entirety and sell that material as a set. We have a while before we find out: Coda likely won’t launch until the end of 2015.